In the baking and packaging of cookies and similar items, dough is deposited on a plurality of parallel conveyor tapes, and the tapes are moved through a baking oven. When the dough emerges from the opposite side of the oven, the dough has been cooked so as to form an edible cookie. Workers then gather a predetermined number of the hot cookies and load them into the semicylindrical cells of cookie trays, and the loaded cookie trays are then placed in a bag and shipped to the retail merchant.
Some cookies of uniform size and shape and with relatively smooth exterior surfaces can be loaded by automatic equipment in the cookie trays. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,290,859, 3,500,984, 3,538,992, 3,927,508, 4,098,392, 4,394,899 and 4,413,462 all disclose various automated machines for loading cookies and the like into containers.
The prior devices utilized for automatically loading cookies and the like into trays do not function very well when the cookies are of irregular size and shape. For example, the relatively new home style cookie which is baked with a substantially flat bottom surface but with an irregular top surface is more difficult to load than a cookie which is smooth on both top and bottom surfaces. An example of a home style cookie is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,455,333, and might include nuts or chocolate chips that form lumps in the top surface of the cookie. The prior art equipment tends to stack and gather the cookies in bundles or groups at various stages prior to loading the cookies in the cell of the cookie tray, and an irregular top surface occasionally causes the equipment to malfunction, or one or more of the cookies are damaged as they are being loaded into a tray.
Typically, the prior art devices accumulate a large number of cookies in stacked relationship, and then a predetermined number of the cookies at the leading end of the stack must be separated from the other cookies by a shearing movement of the compressed stack. While this can be accomplished with cookies having smooth top and bottom surfaces, the more irregulary shaped cookie tends to become damaged and/or the improper number of cookies will be gathered in the group and placed in the cell of the tray.
It is highly desirable to avoid contact between adjacent top and bottom surfaces of adjacent ones of the home style cookies during the stacking process, and when contact is finally made between adjacent cookies, it is desirable that only a minimum contact force be experienced.